The Flopper-2 project

Flopper-2 is a virtual a:drive. A disk less floppy in the making. This project is about stretching the use of newer computer to emulate older computer.  The “floppy drive” is disappearing fast.  Move over, there is no one to one replacement for this drive. Yes there is the CD ROM drive,  but the CD ROM just doesn’t do it. The standard CD can store 1944 times that of the floppy disks like the one to the left. That great, but for many years most of the CD’s were read only.  Modern CD ROM drives can do both read and write to its disk if you use the correct disk and soft ware.  However with  the most popular CD disk you can only write to the CD disk one time.  Yes there is read, write many times CD disk, but there is still the issue of booting the CD. There is no less than 5 basic boot types.  Most modern computers can do all the types of boots, but modern computers and OS’s  runs way to fast and they choke on older style OS’s.

 As of today “Ms-Dos 6”, “Ms-Dos 7” and “Free Dos” still runs perfectly on the newest and fastest computer. But much of the old software no longer works. There is several reasons for this.
1. As newer versions of windows come out, they drop out more and more of the Dos commands that were used in Dos 6.2.
2. If the software use only the basic Dos commands and survives, it may run to fast to be useful. (most Older games runs to fast on modern computers)
3. Very old software tend to access the hardware directly, bypassing the standard Dos command.  Sample: Writing directly to the GCA video controller runs the video faster, but may/will fail to run with system the have EGA or VGA video controllers. This is only one of many problems

It seems that xxx Dos can handle and run more of the older software. However no one is interested in loading xxx DOS  a 3 meg system on a 100 gig hard drive. You can partition the drive, but that can be a monster to do. Here are some possible approaches that make some sense
1. Find and buy and old IBM PC, IBM TX, and IBM AT.    O.K. This may bet bit of a stretch!
2. Find a 386 PC with MS-Dos. Check to see that it has a floppy drive. (I think that you will be hard press to find one the doesn’t have at lest one floppy drive.)  Use “flopper” to run games that run to fast. Find details at  http://www.oldskool.org/pc/flopper
This approach work good up to about 200 mz computer. If it has window 95,98 use the pure Ms-Dos system, and not the dos shell.
3. We now come to windows NT, 2000, XP and most of these systems are with out floppy drives.  At  this level you are almost out of luck. There is two possibility a: and b:

A: Add a standard  internal floppy drive to your computer. then use the two tear level floppy system. Check out the Dinkit project button on the left.
note: USB externel floppy drive may not be a bootable drive.

2. A two tear level CD ROM system. More on this comming soon

  Is it possible for the modern computer to run old style software? stay tuned

note: “Flopper” is trademark of www.oldskoool.org